


don't run our hearts around

by orphan_account



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Episode Tag, M/M, S01E09, mentions of suicide and domestic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 11:30:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2650445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Connor doesn’t do boyfriends, and he doesn’t do drugs.</p><p>Only one of those facts is a lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't run our hearts around

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Black Mountain's song of the same name. Unbeta'd.
> 
> Go down to the end notes for [spoilery] trigger warnings.

Connor doesn’t do boyfriends, and he doesn’t do drugs.

Only one of those facts is a lie.

 

 

The vomit is sticky and bitter in his throat, on his tongue. He holds it in, gagging on it, choking on it, until he reaches the sink and lets it all out. His shoulders are shaking and he thinks he might be crying, except maybe that’s just sweat, maybe that’s just blood, maybe that’s just _Sam’s_ blood.

He retches again, and brings up nothing but bile. He can’t seem to blot two images from his mind: that of Sam’s body, broken and twisted from the fall, and that of the trophy, dark and glistening red in Wes’ white-knuckled hand. Connor grips the edge of the kitchen counter and coughs into the sink, coughs and coughs and coughs until his throat is rubbed raw and he spits out his own blood onto the stainless steel. That’s when he turns on the faucet, and watches the blood and the bile spiral away down the drain, a whirlpool of colour.

They’re screwed. They are so screwed. Connor more than anyone, because it’s his car in Annalise’s driveway, his apartment they all agreed to meet at, his bodily fluids now tainting the Keatings’ kitchen appliances. 

They’re screwed. They are so screwed. Connor twists the faucet off and wipes his gloved hand hard against his mouth, dragging the skin. He realises that he _is _crying: small, sticky tears that smell like salt and sweat. Someone comes up behind him, Laurel maybe, and guides him from the kitchen. From the kitchen to the living room. The living room where Sam is lying, bloody and lifeless. Connor feels like throwing up again, but he has nothing left inside of his stomach to do so. He just stares at Sam’s body, and breathes, and stares, and breathes, and breathes.__

 

 

When he was small, Connor used to lie down in the bath and watch his mother sit in front of the mirror, applying a thick layer of perfumed makeup to hide her bruises. When she was done, she’d scoop him from the water and laugh as she dried him off, except her laughter was empty and clanging like one of those cheap church bells they install once the old one has cracked and broken. Connor used to give her a long, tight hug, careful not to smudge her foundation, and pretend he didn’t notice when her laughter turned into choked sobbing, or when the back of his dry neck became wet again with her tears.

 

 

They go back for the body and they use Connor’s car to do so and _he is so screwed_. There’s no blood on the seats, he knows there’s no blood because they cleaned up too well, but the fibres from the rug have by now embedded themselves into the upholstery, and Connor’s been working for Annalise long enough to know the lengths the prosecution go to to secure their case.

He is so screwed. 

The car is silent, disconcertingly so, and Connor flicks on the radio just to fill the void. The station that comes on is playing Christmas carols, and when Michaela tells him to turn it off, Connor takes that as a sign of encouragement and cranks up the volume. He figures if they’re gonna go to jail, they may as well go in style.

Wes is taking too long in the convenience store. Connor raps his hands against the steering wheel, again and again and again until Laurel tells him to quit it. He desperately tries to think about something else, something other than the slowly decomposing corpse lounging beside his right elbow, and that’s when the chorus of _Jingle Bells_ comes on. 

“Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,” he sings, remembering countless years of his childhood spent carolling, and trying not to imagine how he’ll spend this year’s Christmas. “Oh what fun, to kill someone, and end up in jail.”

 

 

It wasn’t exactly a surprise when Connor came home from school one day and found a note from his mother outside the locked bathroom door. He’d called the police, and they’d shouldered their way inside, quietly swearing when they looked at the bathtub. One woman had taken Connor’s hand and led him away, holding his head straight so he wouldn’t turn back and see, but he knew what had happened. He’d read the note, after all.

 _I’m sorry_ , it had read, in his mother’s bold cursive. _I love you_. 

 

 

The smell of burning flesh fills his nostrils and threatens to make him throw up once more. Connor swallows down the bile, squeezing his eyes shut tight to hold back the tears, and tells himself to get a grip. If Laurel can handle this, if Wes can handle this, if freakin’ _Michaela Pratt_ can handle this, then he can too.

He opens his eyes and lets out the breath he’d been holding and watches the body of Sam Keating burn. It’s not an altogether unpleasant sight, he finds himself thinking. He’s always loved bonfires, ever since he was a kid and his parents had let him go camping with a friend. They’d roasted s’mores over the flames, and the gooey marshmallow had stuck to Connor’s fingers like glue, making him laugh. 

There are no s’mores now. No laughter. Just a body of a murderer slowly disintegrating under the heat, surrounded by four other murderers who can’t even meet each other’s eyes. 

 

 

His dad had shipped him off to boarding school the first opportunity he could. Connor hated it: hated the uniform that always scratched at his skin, hated the shared dormitories where half the boys snored and the other half cried for home, hated the gelatinous food and the mountain of homework and way everybody judged everybody else, all the damn time. Connor found himself feeling self-conscious about his glasses, self-conscious about his hair, self-conscious about his clothes and the way he walked and what he had for breakfast. There wasn’t a moment he had to himself, and it drove him crazy.

At least, until he met Aiden.

 

 

It’s Connor’s job to drive the others home and he does so, in absolute silence. When he gets back to his own apartment, it feels cold and empty and wrong, so he picks up his keys and gets back into his car and drives.

He drives aimlessly, at first, until he realises his feet and his hands are taking him along a familiar route. He thinks maybe he should brake, stop, park the car, because this is such a bad idea, he’s a total and utter mess, and besides, Oliver’s got someone else now. Someone better. Someone who’s not a screw-up and a grade-A dick and someone who actually does boyfriends.

Connor keeps driving. He’s too selfish not to. He pulls up in the parking lot and climbs the three flights of stairs because the elevator is broken and remembers making this very same trip a couple of weeks ago, bouquet in hand. He wishes he hadn’t gone then, and he wishes he hadn’t come now, except for some strange reason his feet won’t listen to him, and neither will his hands, and they’re knocking on the door of apartment 303 and Connor feels like he’s going to throw up again. If Oliver doesn’t answer—

The door swings open and there he is, _there he is_ , looking tired and confused and just a little bit blind, blinking in the dim morning light and asking, “Connor?” Connor can’t help himself: he smiles, which turns into laughter, which turns into hiccuping sobs and then a full blown panic attack right there in the hallway. Oliver lays a hand, gently, carefully, on Connor’s shoulder and tells him to come inside. Connor breathes, half-smiles and half-sobs, and lets himself be led into the warmth, the safety, the peace.

 

 

When Aiden moved away after only a year of attending boarding school, after only six months of hurried kisses in classrooms and fixing each other’s ties in the mornings, Connor should’ve known what was coming. He should’ve known when he called the phone number given to him, when the person on the other end said they had _no idea who Connor Walsh is_ , when he’d called and called and called again and each time got the same response. He should’ve known Aiden would leave him in the dust. That’s what everyone else had done, anyway, and that’s what everybody else would do for the rest of his life.

Connor had sat in his bedroom during the summer holidays, friendless and desolate, and spent the time ripping out every page from his exercise books on which he’d written _CW + AW_ , often encased in neat, red-inked hearts. He’d scrunched up the paper, thrown it into the trash, and tried to erase from his memory Aiden’s hands, Aiden’s lips, Aiden’s laughter, until nothing at all was left of Connor’s first boyfriend but a fading recollection of feeling happier than he’d felt in a long, long time. 

 

 

He stands underneath the shower spray and turns the water to scalding. It burns him, turns his skin raw and red, but Connor thinks back to the fire and the way the flames had curled up and around Sam’s body and knows that he deserves the pain.

He stays in the shower for a long time. Too long. When he shuts off the water his fingers are pruned, but he can’t bring himself to care. He tugs on his boxers and his jeans that still smell like smoke and burnt human flesh, and walks out of the bathroom, still towelling off his hair.

Oliver is waiting for him.

“We need to talk,” he says, and Connor’s heart gives a small flip. What would happen if he told the truth? Would Oliver back away in disgust, fumble for his phone on the nightstand and dial 911 with shaking fingers? Would he laugh, and think Connor was kidding, and ask what was really the matter? Would he stand up, take a few cautious steps forward, and wrap his arms around Connor’s still-wet torso saying _it’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay_ , just like he’d done earlier out in the hallway?

Connor can’t take that chance. “I was high,” he says, the lie sitting bitterly on his tongue and tasting like blood. In truth, he’s never taken any kind of drug in his life. He’d been offered some, in his senior year of boarding school and again in college, but he’d said no for no other reason than he wanted to make it into law school, and drug addicts don’t become lawyers. Oliver, however, seems to believe him, even as he asks more questions. His eyes are wide and round, sad and angry all at once, and Connor hates himself for coming here this morning, for coming here at all, for ever meeting Oliver and dragging him into the hot mess that is Connor’s life.

“I have a drug problem,” he says, and the words sit uncomfortably on his tongue, in his heart. Even when Annalise texts and asks him to come in, even with the knowledge that maybe _this is it_ filling every organ of his body, Connor still regrets that look on Oliver’s face the most.

The disappointment. The pity. The _trust_. He doesn’t deserve any of it, especially the latter. 

Connor promises to come back, to talk it over, to weave himself an even tighter web of lies. He swallows down the truth that’s clawing at his throat, demanding to be let out, to be heard, and reminds himself that he doesn’t do boyfriends. He hasn’t since Aiden Walker broke his heart, and he never will. Except—

 

 

Connor had met him at a bar. Those dumb coke-bottle glasses and the uneven smile drew him in like a moth to a flame, and he knew that tonight would be a quick and easy fuck. And it was. But then he’d come back, again and again, and he couldn’t pretend anymore, couldn’t tell himself that it was for work, that it was for Annalise, because in all actuality the nights he spent with Oliver were for no-one’s benefit but Connor’s. And that knowledge, secreted away in the deepest, darkest place of his mind, held under padlock and key and reinforced steel door, made his heart do all kinds of things it hadn’t done in years.

 

 

—except Connor is Annalise Keating’s law student, after all, and he’s gotten good at knowing the difference between truth and lies. And right now?

Sam isn’t the only secret Connor has learned to keep.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Warnings:** Connor's mother was abused by her husband, and killed herself when Connor was young. There are no explicit details, but these things are mentioned several times. Sam's body and what the Keating 4 do with it is also described quite graphically.
> 
>  **EDIT:** Connor's family life is a HEADCANON of mine. Nothing of the sort has been mentioned in the show. Just clearing that up.


End file.
